Reporter's Notebook

Readers discuss the ethics of choosing to abort a fetus based on sex, race, disability, and, perhaps in the future, sexual orientation. To join the debate or share your own experience, email hello@theatlantic.com. (For a broader series of reader stories on abortion, go here.)

I lean pro-choice, but I doff my hat to the pro-life camp for this deft maneuver. They have demonstrated that it is logically impossible to be both “pro-choice” and “anti-discrimination.” Why is this the case? Because “choice” and “discrimination” are the same thing.

But pro-life advocates are also put in a difficult spot, as Noah Berlatsky explains in a 2013 Atlantic post about a new documentary, It’s a Girl, which investigated the high rates of sex-selective abortion and infanticide in China and India. The film’s trailer presents a shocking finding: that those two countries “eliminate more girls [every year] than the number of girls born in America every year”:

Here’s Berlatsky:

In the film, Dr. Puneet Bedi argues that ultrasound and abortion has increased the ease of gendercide for wealthier people, and so has created unprecedented gender imbalances (140 boys to 100 girls, according to the film). Other sources, though, dispute that technology has made that much of a difference, arguing that before abortion, infanticide was simply more widespread. Either way, though, the point remains that the root of the problem is clearly not abortion per se, but widespread sexism and sexual violence—which puts pro-lifers, with their often explicitly anti-feminist rhetoric, in an awkward position.

If people are worried about sex-selective (or other kinds of selective—race, disability, etc.) abortion in America, maybe they should concentrate on how our society devalues women, people of color, and the disabled, and ask what forces might cause someone to make that choice in the first place. The fact that someone would abort an otherwise wanted pregnancy on these bases is a result of the inherent sexism, racism, and other prejudices in our society. Deal with the cause instead of obstructing women’s access to necessary healthcare.

Another reader tries to imagine a scenario in which banning sex-selective abortion would be beneficial to society at large:

Abortion is legal in the U.S. on the premise that a woman cannot be forced to carry a pregnancy during the first trimester because her choice (under her right to privacy) to NOT be pregnant outweighs any interest the state has in regulating her reproduction. Given that it denies a first-trimester fetus the most basic human right possible (the right to life), Roe v Wade thus strongly implies that the fetus has no enforceable rights during the first trimester. That being the case, it’s hard to see how any particular fetus can have a Constitutional right to not be being aborted based on its particular characteristics.

Thus, regulation of selective abortion would have to be based on some compelling state interest other than the rights of an individual fetus. I can imagine such a case against sex-selective abortion: a balance of the sexes being a highly desirable trait of a stable society. It’s a bit of stretch, and extremely difficult to enforce, but imaginable.

It’s less of a stretch for countries such as China and India—and Pakistan; here’s a 2012 Atlantic post from Habiba Nosheen and Hilke Schellman entitled “Abandoned, Aborted, or Left for Dead: These Are the Vanishing Girls of Pakistan.”

Following my callout for stories from expectant parents confronting a Down Syndrome diagnosis, a reader steps forward:

My wife and I discovered early in her second pregnancy that the fetus had Down Syndrome, and we elected to abort. It was a difficult decision, but I will always fight to make sure others in our situation are permitted the same choices we had.

I believe that people tend to overlook the complexity of this tragic question and forget that everyone’s situation is unique. (Our first child was already diagnosed with a genetic disorder, and we were not sure we had the resources to care for two special needs children.) Furthermore, there’s a tendency to see Down Syndrome births as occurring in a vacuum—a single potential life whose existence is predicated on an abortion decision. Three months later (well before the expected delivery date of the terminated pregnancy) we were expecting once again, and had a healthy baby girl. Is her existence a violation of some higher power’s plan?

“Everyone’s situation is unique” carries the same meaning as “It’s So Personal,” the name of an Atlantic/Dish reader series on late-term abortions that I edited back in 2009. (It was prompted by my former colleague Andrew Sullivan’s reaction to the assassination of abortionist George Tiller.) Those personal stories center on genetic abnormalities more severe than Down Syndrome, but, as this second reader explains, that line is often blurrier than I assume:

Parents who abort because of Down Syndrome get singularly called out in these discussions and that is a real shame. They already live with the pain of not knowing where their baby would have fallen on the spectrum of health for Down Syndrome. Children with the syndrome have a wide variety of health outcomes, from death in utero to potentially long lives. Some live short lives full of pain. Some live long healthy lives. A parent can’t know which the child will have in advance.

The part I find unutterably cruel about banning abortions based on genetic defects is that it includes the recessive inheritable diseases, many of which are worse than you can imagine. (Down Syndrome is a trisomy, so it isn’t a family trait; a family that has one child with Down Syndrome probably won’t have siblings with Down Syndrome.) Parents who carry the matching recessive genes have a 25% chance of those with every pregnancy; they are often diagnosed with the first sick child.

I am a genetic carrier for hydrocephalus, gene unknown. My first son was diagnosed at 30 weeks, when an ultrasound showed a head that was much larger than full term and held a paper-thin film of brain lining the skull. The rest showed as empty blackness, full of fluid.

We choose a late-term abortion of a child we loved desperately and still miss. But his life would have been hospitals and pain, unknown life expectancy and who knows what level of perception and participation from him.

My second son had hydrocephalus as well. We lost him too. We mourn on their death days and birth days. My third son, now a toddler, has been healthy and returned joy to our lives after three black years.

Honestly, I am comparatively lucky. There is a women on a genetic carrier forum who found out she carries the SMA gene by watching her daughter die at nine months old, starved, unable to swallow as she lost muscle tone. She knows she would never put another child through that.

Another woman on the forum carries Walker-Warburg. Her first son, born when she was 19, died at a year-and-a-half. Her second son, born when she was 23, died at one year. Her third son, conceived when she was 26, also carried Walker-Warburg. Would you force her to carry him to term, tend him for a year and watch him die? This legislation in Indiana does.

We have a woman whose first child has cystic fibrosis. They are fine and managing it, but she doesn’t want a second child with cystic fibrosis because she is worried about cross-infections and she can’t care this intensively for two sick children.

These are parents who know what they are facing, often learning it from the slow death of their first child. They know exactly what the diagnosis means. They have all the love any parent does; for most, that means sparing their next child. Even the spectacularly cruel rationalization that “everything happens for a reason” and finding silver linings in the love for their child doesn’t explain having to repeat such pain.

I think it is important to declare honestly that I matter too. I did not want to be who I would have been if we had had our first two sons. From the very beginning, I could not have borne them. Their heads were too large, skulls bulging with fluid. We would have both died in a vaginal delivery. I did not want a c-section—major abdominal surgery—to have babies who likely would not live long.

Had they lived, I did not want to be a hospital mom. I didn’t want to spend weeks in the hospital, know the best parking lots and nurses, watch the babies have recurring infections, want to cuddle them through their tubes. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to spend my life at appointments, scheduling therapists, chasing diagnoses, and holding him while he has blood drawn. Their father and I both have jobs that we like and find interesting; neither wanted to quit and fill our minds with the details of medical care and syndromes. This is all while our sons are young and cute and we can be their primary caregivers. If they had lived long lives, I didn’t want their care to fall on others in our families.

I will miss my boys until I die. But I would rather be the mother with that grief than be the parent who was mentally and physically and financially absorbed into their hydrocephalus. My future wasn’t my top consideration, but it isn’t irrelevant either. I am also a person in our family and my quality of life is also part of the decision.

Finally, the birth of our healthy third son has proved to me that we were right: Each delightful thing he does, every normal healthy milestone, is wonderful. That is an important part of what we yearned for when we yearned for children. We spend time with our son on bicycles and in parks, not long drives in a car seat he hates to a different specialist, or hospitals getting a new shunt.

My now-four year immersion in the world of genetic carriers has taught me that these parents love their children, healthy, sick and dead, with everything they’ve got. They make these decisions based on what they know of the illness, of themselves and the baby’s siblings. They crave families with healthy children. If they can afford it, they use every technology they can find to help them. (I deeply despise the phrase “designer children.” Fuck eye color, when genetic technology can’t even give me children with whole brains.)

Many times, all of their thought and love leads them to abort fetuses that they want very much, knowing what lies ahead for those babies when they leave the warmth and support of the womb. They are incredibly brave parents. It is deeply wrong for anyone else to interfere in that decision.

Greg is aligned with this reader’s point that laws against sex-selective abortion are “pretty much unenforceable”:

I agree that the natural response to making these abortions illegal is for parents to lie (and I seriously doubt that it’s predominantly women making these decisions; male coercion is seriously underappreciated). If you are determined to abort your child, the truth is no obstacle.

The larger point is to stigmatize this decision legally in the hope of shaping culture in a more positive direction for valuing human life regardless of how it looks. Same as incremental restrictions on smoking, soda consumption, opioid use, etc.

Another reader, William, shifts the discussion to disability:

Sex-selective abortion may not be common in the United States, but disability-selective abortion, which is also mentioned in Emma's article, sure is.

Usually people justify abortion on the grounds of “genetic defects” by saying that the baby would have a horrible life anyway, but let’s talk about Down syndrome. Over 90% of babies with that condition in this country are never given a chance at life. People with Down syndrome are not vegetables. Their average life expectancy is 60 years. By all accounts they bring love and joy into the lives of those around them. Some are even able to hold down jobs and apartments.

I support keeping abortion legal at least early in development, and I also don’t mean to downplay the hardships of parents raising children with Down syndrome, which is a lifelong and arduous task. But a 90% abortion rate, even though it’s not literal eugenics (which would imply an organized effort rather than a set of individual decisions), is functionally equivalent. Pointing that out is not “getting into the weeds” [as Terri put it].

Another reader adds:

Taking care of children with genetic abnormalities is incredibly expensive (we’re talking on the order of millions of, typically, tax-payer funded medical services over a life time), incredibly difficult on the parents, incredibly difficult on the marriage, and the child’s quality of life is sub-par at best. So, while I would say we probably should prohibit abortion based on sex, lest we end up with a world full of males, abortion based on virtually any other reason is more than acceptable. It is the woman’s choice whether she has a child, not anyone else’s.

Have you ever had to confront that choice—to abort or keep a fetus with Down Syndrome? If you’d like to share your experience, in an anonymous space, please let us know.

Emma just posted a piece on the provocative issue of sex-selective abortion, pegged to a recently passed law in Indiana banning the killing of a fetus based on its “race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, or diagnosis or potential diagnosis of the fetus having Down syndrome or any other disability.” Such abortions raise a lot of ethical quandaries among pro-choice progressives, especially advocates for the disabled. As Emma puts it:

Should couples be able to abort their female fetuses—and it’s almost always female fetuses—in the hopes of having the boy they really wanted? Should a mom, ashamed at having a mixed-race baby, be able to abort because of race?

… or because of sexual orientation, if a “gay gene” is ever discovered? Terri, a member of the Atlantic reader group TAD, doesn’t see any quandaries here:

Advocates of the Indiana law want to get into the weeds to make people uncomfortable in their defenses of specific circumstances in order to piecemeal restrict abortion and thus set precedent for even further restriction. It isn’t an argument worth having. The answer is simple: Abortion is no one’s business but the woman and her doctor.

Responding to Terri, another reader worries that sex-selective abortion could be a slippery slope to eugenics, aided by the increased use of genetic engineering technology (such as CRISPR, previously covered in Notes):

It’s not the weeds. Technology has enabled people to choose to abort because of sex, disability, selective reduction (not wanting the hassle/expense of twins—“eenie meenie, miny ... go ahead and kill THAT one). Soon we will add more knowable features. Children are rapidly becoming more like a customizable product. If the DNA isn’t for a strapping, blonde, healthy son just abort and try again. It’s not coincidence that [early 20th century birth-control activist] Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenicist.

This reader makes a key distinction:

I don’t see the problem with people selectively choosing which genes they want to pass on (or introduce, for that matter)—as long as it’s their choice. The problem comes in when people are coerced into it.

What do you think about this controversial issue? Drop us an email to sound off. Another reader thinks this is all a theoretical debate:

They have laws against sex-selective abortion in a few countries, but it’s pretty much unenforceable, because people will just lie about why they’re having an abortion. The only way would be to ban ultrasounds and pre-natal testing so parents are in dark about the sex or potential health problems of the fetus. That is probably what Indiana wishes to do but can’t.

Of course, in America it’s a non-starter because it directly contradicts Roe v Wade and the criteria therein. It’s also a “solution” in search of a problem. Sex-selective abortion isn’t a problem in America and gender-ratios aren’t being skewed.

Statistics for sex-selective abortions in the U.S. are hard to come by, but there is some evidence backing the reader’s claim that “gender-ratios aren’t being skewed.” The link Emma used for asserting that “it’s almost always female fetuses” leads to a report that doesn’t include figures from the U.S., “only numbers from societies where the problem is widespread,” as the authors put it. For more perspective on sex-selective abortions among Americans, Sujatha Jesudason and Anat Shenker-Osorio wrote a 2012 piece for RH Reality Check that was featured on our site:

The extent of sex-selective practices in the U.S. is hard to assess, since it’s rarely something people will admit to doing. But we can make an educated guess by observing alterations in expected sex ratios. If nature has its way, women will likely give birth to 100 girls for every 102 to 106 boys (for a ratio of 1.02 to 1.06 boys per girl). And among first-time parents in the U.S., that's exactly what we see.

However, as birth order rises, apparently so does selection -- at least, in certain ethnic groups. With 2000 U.S. Census data, researchers investigating Korean, Chinese, and Indian communities found that, after having one girl, parents have as many as 1.17 boys per girl when their next child is born. With two girls at home, the ratio goes up to 1.51 boys per girl for the third child (meaning 151 boys are born for each 100 girls). These skewed ratios aren’t present among other ethnic groups in America.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET on May 25, 2019.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In war, the temptation to take revenge is strong. Fighting that temptation is a commanding officer’s job.

“We fight with the values that we represent; we don’t adopt those of our enemy.” This is what I told the Marines standing in a loose semicircle around me on our forward operating base outside Karmah, Iraq, one day in December 2008. “If we lose sight of that, we’ve got nothing left.” I meant every word. For many of us it was becoming harder to make sense of the war in Iraq, but we needed to believe that we were fighting for something. Most could articulate a version of that argument themselves during squad-level discussions back in Hawaii, but now it was hard to tell what impact my words were having. I watched the familiar faces as I spoke. Some nodded, others looked at the ground, shifting their feet on the gravel or gazing back impassively, their expressions a reflection of the gray skies and drizzling rain.

He said she was oversensitive. She said his constant criticism was tantamount to emotional abuse.

Just a few months into her new life in a new state with her boyfriend of three years, Lauren was nearing the breaking point. “I go back and forth between thinking I have to break up with him,” she told a friend, “and thinking that I don't want to be without him.”

She Gchatted a different friend to say her boyfriend had called her at work to complain that a box of her crafting supplies had fallen off the kitchen table and dented the floor. Lauren began to see the way he treated her wasn’t okay. She devised a move-out plan: She would return to her hometown for a while and find a new job.

Ultimately, “... I couldn’t do it,” she wrote to another friend. She had invested so much time. Being single again would leave her adrift. So, she stayed.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

Smith College’s annual commencement ceremony begins like any other: Graduating seniors at the women’s liberal-arts college are called up one by one to collect their diploma from the president. Perhaps some students exchange a wink with the regalia-clad honorary-degree recipients nearby as they stride across a platform overlooking the dorms they’d for years called home; others may pause to flip their cap’s tassel while blowing a kiss to the sea of parents who have long awaited this milestone commemorating their daughter’s metamorphosis from undergraduate to alumna.

Except the moment, technically, hasn’t happened quite yet: The name, degree, and accolades printed inside each padded holder seldom belong to the woman who receives it. They very likely belong, rather, to one of her nearly 700 classmates.

To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands.

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.

Just as the anti-vaccination movement feeds off a handful of fringe outsiders, long-standing stereotypes about Jews have found a new vector in the latest outbreak of the disease.

As the measles has spread in and around New York, so has anti-Semitism.

Amid an outbreak largely attributed to the anti-vax movement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed that, as of mid-May, 880 cases have been confirmed nationwide in 2019, “the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1994 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000.” Since September 2018, 535 cases have been confirmed in Brooklyn and Queens alone, largely concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities. Another 247 cases have been confirmed in Rockland County, north of New York City, also largely among Orthodox Jews.

The spread of measles is matched by a twin pathology. Since the start of the latest measles outbreak last fall, the Anti-Defamation League has seen a spike in reports of harassment specifically related to measles, yet another expression of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S.: pedestrians crossing the street to get away from visibly Jewish people, bus drivers barring Jews from boarding, and people tossing out slurs such as “dirty Jew.”

The White House can’t end the conflict by expecting one side to surrender unconditionally.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally about land and territory? It is certainly partly about that. But when you hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the issue of who has what part of which territory doesn’t necessarily figure all that prominently.

I recently took part in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel organized by the Philos Project. One Palestinian official whom we met told us, “I’m not going to compromise my dignity.”

The problem with what we know of the Trump administration’s “peace plan” is that it asks Palestinians to do precisely that. The entire Donald Trump approach seems to be premised on calling for unilateral surrender. It is premised on destroying the will of a people, and on hoping that despair might one day turn into acquiescence. This is the only way to interpret Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s insistence on prioritizing economic incentives over political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about human motivation.

Naturopaths have long been obsessed with a gene called MTHFR. Now vaccine skeptics are testing for it too.

David Reif, now a biologist at NC State, realized his old paper had taken on a dangerous second life when he saw it cited—not in the scientific literature, but in a court case.

The paper was titled “Genetic Basis for Adverse Events after Smallpox Vaccination,” and it came up in 2016 when a vaccine-skeptical doctor tried to argue that it explained her patient’s development delays. The court was not persuaded, but Reif’s co-authors began hearing of yet other doctors using DNA tests to exempt patients from vaccines. Just this month, San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits and a 23andMe DNA test.” On anti-vaccine blogs and websites, activists have been sharing step-by-step instructions for ordering 23andMe tests, downloading the raw data, and using a third-party app to analyze a gene called MTHFR. Certain MTHFR mutations, they believe, predispose kids to bad reactions to vaccines, possibly even leading to autism—a fear unsupported by science.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET on May 25, 2019.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In war, the temptation to take revenge is strong. Fighting that temptation is a commanding officer’s job.

“We fight with the values that we represent; we don’t adopt those of our enemy.” This is what I told the Marines standing in a loose semicircle around me on our forward operating base outside Karmah, Iraq, one day in December 2008. “If we lose sight of that, we’ve got nothing left.” I meant every word. For many of us it was becoming harder to make sense of the war in Iraq, but we needed to believe that we were fighting for something. Most could articulate a version of that argument themselves during squad-level discussions back in Hawaii, but now it was hard to tell what impact my words were having. I watched the familiar faces as I spoke. Some nodded, others looked at the ground, shifting their feet on the gravel or gazing back impassively, their expressions a reflection of the gray skies and drizzling rain.

He said she was oversensitive. She said his constant criticism was tantamount to emotional abuse.

Just a few months into her new life in a new state with her boyfriend of three years, Lauren was nearing the breaking point. “I go back and forth between thinking I have to break up with him,” she told a friend, “and thinking that I don't want to be without him.”

She Gchatted a different friend to say her boyfriend had called her at work to complain that a box of her crafting supplies had fallen off the kitchen table and dented the floor. Lauren began to see the way he treated her wasn’t okay. She devised a move-out plan: She would return to her hometown for a while and find a new job.

Ultimately, “... I couldn’t do it,” she wrote to another friend. She had invested so much time. Being single again would leave her adrift. So, she stayed.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

Smith College’s annual commencement ceremony begins like any other: Graduating seniors at the women’s liberal-arts college are called up one by one to collect their diploma from the president. Perhaps some students exchange a wink with the regalia-clad honorary-degree recipients nearby as they stride across a platform overlooking the dorms they’d for years called home; others may pause to flip their cap’s tassel while blowing a kiss to the sea of parents who have long awaited this milestone commemorating their daughter’s metamorphosis from undergraduate to alumna.

Except the moment, technically, hasn’t happened quite yet: The name, degree, and accolades printed inside each padded holder seldom belong to the woman who receives it. They very likely belong, rather, to one of her nearly 700 classmates.

To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands.

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.

Just as the anti-vaccination movement feeds off a handful of fringe outsiders, long-standing stereotypes about Jews have found a new vector in the latest outbreak of the disease.

As the measles has spread in and around New York, so has anti-Semitism.

Amid an outbreak largely attributed to the anti-vax movement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed that, as of mid-May, 880 cases have been confirmed nationwide in 2019, “the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1994 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000.” Since September 2018, 535 cases have been confirmed in Brooklyn and Queens alone, largely concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities. Another 247 cases have been confirmed in Rockland County, north of New York City, also largely among Orthodox Jews.

The spread of measles is matched by a twin pathology. Since the start of the latest measles outbreak last fall, the Anti-Defamation League has seen a spike in reports of harassment specifically related to measles, yet another expression of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S.: pedestrians crossing the street to get away from visibly Jewish people, bus drivers barring Jews from boarding, and people tossing out slurs such as “dirty Jew.”

The White House can’t end the conflict by expecting one side to surrender unconditionally.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally about land and territory? It is certainly partly about that. But when you hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the issue of who has what part of which territory doesn’t necessarily figure all that prominently.

I recently took part in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel organized by the Philos Project. One Palestinian official whom we met told us, “I’m not going to compromise my dignity.”

The problem with what we know of the Trump administration’s “peace plan” is that it asks Palestinians to do precisely that. The entire Donald Trump approach seems to be premised on calling for unilateral surrender. It is premised on destroying the will of a people, and on hoping that despair might one day turn into acquiescence. This is the only way to interpret Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s insistence on prioritizing economic incentives over political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about human motivation.

Naturopaths have long been obsessed with a gene called MTHFR. Now vaccine skeptics are testing for it too.

David Reif, now a biologist at NC State, realized his old paper had taken on a dangerous second life when he saw it cited—not in the scientific literature, but in a court case.

The paper was titled “Genetic Basis for Adverse Events after Smallpox Vaccination,” and it came up in 2016 when a vaccine-skeptical doctor tried to argue that it explained her patient’s development delays. The court was not persuaded, but Reif’s co-authors began hearing of yet other doctors using DNA tests to exempt patients from vaccines. Just this month, San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits and a 23andMe DNA test.” On anti-vaccine blogs and websites, activists have been sharing step-by-step instructions for ordering 23andMe tests, downloading the raw data, and using a third-party app to analyze a gene called MTHFR. Certain MTHFR mutations, they believe, predispose kids to bad reactions to vaccines, possibly even leading to autism—a fear unsupported by science.